


Preserve

by stephanericher



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 09:02:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7838683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stephanericher/pseuds/stephanericher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I know I’m impatient, but I’ll wait for you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Preserve

“They chose me for the Kerberos mission.”

Keith swallows. He’d known this was coming; there’s no way in hell they’d let someone like Shiro graduate at the top of a strong class and get some cozy mission to document life forms on Io or do seismic experiments on the moon; there’s no way Shiro would be happy doing that stuff in the first place. He’s the best choice for that kind of mission, both because of his skills and because he’s a born explorer, and Keith really wants to be happy for him. On some level he is, but at the top level (and several levels below that) he doesn’t want this. He doesn’t want Shiro to leave and head for a far-off moon of a dwarf planet at the edge of their solar system and to potentially stay out there for years. As unrealistic as it is, he wants to keep Shiro here with him, at least until he graduates, so they can head out into the universe together.

It’s stupid of him; it was stupid of him to be born this late in the first place. Shiro tightens his arm around Keith’s waist; his face is grave when he should be celebrating.

“I don’t want to leave you, Keith.”

He doesn’t want Shiro to go. “But you have to.”

“I know. And—and.” He takes a breath. “I don’t want to hold you back. I could be gone for years; it could be one year or five and who knows what opportunities might be out there for you by the time I come back? I just…it’s not fair to you. for me to go off for this long and expect you not to have other thoughts or to want to pursue other people, especially when you’re still in school.”

“Are you breaking up with me?”

The blood is churning in his veins, thumping in his ears; he trusts Shiro and trusts that he’d meant every word he’d said about not wanting to leave. But he also trusts his gut to tell him when something’s up, especially something like this. Shiro doesn’t answer.

“You’re breaking up with me,” he says, and his voice is about to crack but the pitch and the volume keep rising. “Were you just playing with me? Was this only ever meant to be a temporary thing?”

He’s twisting Shiro’s words and intentions, but he’s already said the words by the time it all really registers, by the time he sees the hurt flash across Shiro’s face like lightning. Keith’s throat tightens, and he gets up to leave. He doesn’t want it to end like this but doesn’t trust himself not to make things worse.

“Wait,” Shiro calls, and he grabs onto Keith’s hand, and every thought of leaving drains from him like water through a sieve.

And Shiro pulls him back in, hugs him close and tight enough that Keith wants to believe he’ll never let go.

“I’ve never not been serious about you,” Shiro murmurs into his hair. “And I’d hoped…I didn’t want this to end.”

“I know I’m impatient, but I’ll wait for you,” Keith whispers (he doesn’t trust his voice any louder than that or it’ll crack and break like rocks under his feet when he steps too close to the edge of the canyon).

“I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not asking. I’m doing it anyway.”

“Keith,” says Shiro, and his voice is thick like the atmosphere the few days of the year it rains. “Just…promise me, if I don’t come back, if something happens to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen.”

“But if it does. Just, please, promise me you’ll move on?”

He can’t even fathom that kind of betrayal, the idea of giving up, not with Shiro’s arms so tight around his waist, Shiro’s body wrapped around his like planetary rings, the smell of soap and sweat on Shiro’s skin every time he inhales. But nothing’s going to happen, so he whispers an affirmative and holds on tight.

* * *

Except something does happen. They hear about it in the middle of class, the rumors spreading like gravitational waves from colliding black holes, distorting as they cross the universe of academy classrooms and halls—they lost the Kerberos ship; no one knows what happened; transmissions cut off after something strange; no one knows about any of the astronauts, and a sick feeling of dread starts to spread across Keith’s body, up through his stomach and throat.

There’s an assembly in the afternoon; classes are canceled and Keith can’t bring himself to care that he doesn’t get to fly today, especially not when he hears the ship is indeed missing but not to worry, that anything could have happened and they’re beginning to investigate, except they had fucking cameras looking out in the Pluto system with live feeds; the delay isn’t longer than the delay from the ship’s radio; they have to know. Whatever it is they just don’t want to say.

And no one gives him a straight answer; after two weeks of officers telling him to butt out and that it’s none of his concern (none of his concern that his fucking boyfriend is lost or missing or dead and they’re too afraid to tell him what’s going on?) he can’t take it anymore.

He leaves with a couple of sets of clothing and the toolset in the hangar that’s become more or less his, slipping out of the side door of the garage. The school year’s nearly over but he’s not going to hang around and listen to them lie, not when every corner he turns reminds him of Shiro, when the possibility that he may never see Shiro again seems very real, when he might never watch Shiro key in flight sequences like a piano prodigy dashing off a particularly difficult concerto, when he might never feel Shiro’s body pressed to his, hear Shiro’s voice say exactly the words he needs to hear—but no. He’s not going to entertain that possibility. If he can’t find out from the inside, he’ll find out from the outside. He’ll intercept transmissions, study every pattern, do whatever it takes to find Shiro, and bring him back home if need be.

* * *

The desert is wide and rocky and its temperature fluctuates wildly; Keith knows this all too well from growing up here. But it’s easy to forget and mask how unforgiving it can be out in the dust all day and night, when all his amenities come from an abandoned shack with poor insulation and power he has to generate himself. And it’s lonely; Keith’s never felt the need for constant social interaction but there’s something about going days and maybe weeks without human contact that starts to irritate him like a strap digging into his skin until he bleeds. And even though he knows the coyotes probably won’t come near hear whenever he hears them at night it’s enough to keep him up another hour trying to track and pinpoint their voices from the way they echo off the canyon walls.

Some nights he looks up at the stars and planets, wondering if Shiro’s out there anywhere he can see. Had he been waylaid out by Jupiter? Had he ended up near Sirius? And wherever he is, is he okay? (Keith can never bring himself to wonder if Shiro’s alive; it’s better not to doubt and somewhere inside of him he knows Shiro’s out there, feels it in his bones like water inside a saguaro. It’s those nights he misses Shiro the most—the pain scars over but it’s still there, still hurting him as he scours the stars and picks up distant radio signals, trying to transcribe them as quickly as possible and decode them somehow, with a device or by hand or by just guessing.

And after a month the data’s still all scattered; all he has to keep him going are lines of speech that buzz over through the static occasionally (and he’s long since stopped picking up the feed of the local sports station; he can pick out the worthless noise of the soccer fans and car commercials and spin the tuner away within a quarter of a second), sometimes “Kerberos” or “aliens” and sometimes foreign words in strange tongues that sound like nothing made on earth. He plays them backwards and forwards, records them and scrambles the pieces, permutes them over and over again.

But then the data starts to make a little sense, to sort itself into a vague outline, a map of some sort. It could be the stars or the galaxies or here on earth, but it’s definitely something, definitely enough to give him hope. He won’t move on, won’t give up, not when he has enough of that to cling to, enough of a reason to believe in Shiro’s return.

* * *

And then it all happens at once, somewhere a spark igniting the chain reaction of Keith figuring out the map and pinpointing the signals and the location, of Shiro crashing back to earth at the exact predicted time and place, of pulling him out and finding those three students, of piecing together each of their clues to find the blue lion. And from there it continues, flare after flare in an overindulgent fireworks show of events.

Keith doesn’t really get to talk to Shiro, not alone and not for more than a moment or two, for maybe a week, and even if they’d found themselves together for an extended period he’s not sure what he’d say, or what Shiro would say. How can he put everything, all the faith and longing that had built up under his skin, into words? Does Shiro even still want him, after all that’s happened?

He’s sitting on his bed reading a book when Shiro knocks and pokes his head in, and all of a sudden Keith is blown back to the academy, the way Shiro would come to his room when Keith had wanted him there the most but felt the least like finding him, and they’d talk about nothing or everything or something in between until Shiro could get him to smile, or they’d go off to the gym and work out together until Keith couldn’t keep up anymore. And just like then, Shiro walks over and sits down next to him on the bed, and Keith waits.

“Hey,” says Shiro.

“Hey,” says Keith.

“Listen,” says Shiro. “About us. It’s—”

“I waited for you,” Keith interrupts. “I looked.”

Shiro looks almost as if he wants to cry (Keith’s never seen him do it, not even the night before he’d left, and he doesn’t want to). And he doesn’t know how to stop it, what to say to make Shiro feel better, what it is about what he’d said that had upset him this much in the first place, so he springs for the first words that come to mind.

“But if you don’t want this, then.”

Then what? He’s not going to understand, and he’s not going to just give up on Shiro after finding him again.

“I’m different,” Shiro says, loathing creeping into his voice like a house centipede. “I’m not the way I was, and I can’t expect to be.”

And Shiro has changed. There are now things he can’t remember but can’t forget either, the things that changed his arm and gave him that scar across his face, took the lightness from his features and replaced it with a vulnerable sadness that’s still there even when he smiles. And a huge part of Keith wants to personally kill every single member of the Galra empire for what this has done to Shiro, but the rest of him is here, now, with Shiro. He takes Shiro’s Galra hand in his, laces his fingers through Shiro’s, waits for Shiro’s fingers to curl around his hand (and then they finally do).

“You’re still you.”

And that’s all the reassurance Shiro needs to press his lips to Keith’s.

**Author's Note:**

> i may have subconsciously written this with sheith as childhood friends in mind lmao


End file.
